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Teaching with Data

Teaching with Data is a portal where faculty can find resources and ideas to reduce the challenges of bringing real data into post-secondary classes. Using real data is a great way for students to become more engaged in the content of a course, but significant barriers, largely in terms instructor preparation, exist that can make using data a challenge. Teaching with Data allows faculty to introduce and build students' quantitative reasoning abilities with readily available, user-friendly, data-driven teaching materials. Including data early and often throughout the curriculum not only allows students to practice quantitative skills such as reading tables or translating numbers into graphs or charts, but their interest in and understanding of course material can be piqued by the excitement of doing empirical work. Additionally, opportunities to see how social scientists examine issues and draw conclusions should lessen the disconnect many students experience between substantive and methods/statistics courses. with the content of a course, to experience the work of social scientists, and strengthen valuable skills that will useful in everyday life, even if they do not take another social science course.

Teaching with Data is a partnership between the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN), both at the University of Michigan. The project is funded by NSF Award 0840642, George Alter (ICPSR), PI and William Frey (SSDAN), co-PI.

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This project and its website were supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health under award number R25HD078226. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.